The money spent on prisons is criminal

It was ironic that your leader appeared on the same day as your report on cuts in the budget for the Criminal Cases Review Commission (Cuts bring fear for victims of miscarriages of justice, November 17). These cuts signify a key aspect of the criminal justice debate that you failed to highlight, namely the law and order budget itself. According to the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies, the government has spent around £187bn on law and order in the last 10 years. At the same time, there are serious concerns around funding for legal aid, outdoor activities for young people and even treatment programmes for sex offenders and those convicted of domestic violence.

Funds continue to be poured into law and order "services" such as prisons, while other areas of the criminal-justice system designed to prevent crime, change offenders and offer unconditional support to victims remain on the margins due to the government's obsession with simplistic solutions to complex human and social problems. This is further compounded by the insidious positioning of those who oppose government policy as pro-crime and anti-victim, a rhetoric that has become institutionalised in political debate, but which does nothing to deal with the complexity of the issues involved.

If the prison crisis is to be alleviated, the starting point should be the problem of the prison itself: its voracious appetite for funding, its destructive nature and the collateral damage it causes. Stopping prison building would be a positive first step on this journey. As the former lord chief justice Harry Woolf pointed out earlier this year, prison has an "amazing capacity to absorb money as the population increases more than expected". This is a lesson politicians seem incapable of either learning or addressing.Professor Joe SimLiverpool John Moores University

It is not just the prison system that is overstretched. Other criminal-justice agencies, notably the probation service and youth offending services, have become swamped by rising caseloads in recent years.

As the government has increasingly resorted to criminal-justice interventions to tackle social problems of mental health, drug addiction, homelessness and family conflict, the entire criminal-justice system has grown significantly, both in terms of the numbers working for it and the numbers being processed by it. Consequently the UK spends a higher proportion of its national income on law and order than any other of the industrialised nations that make up the OECD, including the US and our European neighbours.

The solution is not only to revisit sentencing policy, but to rethink the role and purpose of the criminal-justice system in the 21st century. Enver SolomonDeputy director, Centre for Crime and Justice Studies, King's College London